Wednesday, April 20, 2005

John Cloud is a Tool

The CJR interview with him makes that crystal-clear. And Media Mattersand August J. Pollak of Xoverboard smack him around from here to next Tuesday. (Thanks to Atrios for the CJR, MM and Xoverboard links.)
I strongly suspect that Cloud had a nice long talk with Time's in-house lawyers before doing that CJR interview.
Why? Notice certain key statements of Cloud's which imply that Alterman and Brock's and Pollak's partisanship automatically makes their facts suspect -- but without actually providing evidence in context to back up these implied assertions.
He doesn't dare say that Eric Alterman and Media Matters and Pollak are wrong on a specific set of facts, much less say that they were deliberately wrong on them; he knows if he dared do that, Alterman at any rate would sue his ass into the dirt, NYT v. Sullivan be damned. So instead, he settles for these subtle little smears that I believe came either from Time's in-house legal staff or the RNC (or possibly both).
It cuts no ice with me that these smears are of the "they both are equally icky" variety. Remember, the RNC doesn't care if you think they're corrupt, so long as you think the Democrats are corrupt, too. Cynicism lowers voter turnout, and Republicans love low voter turnout (why do you think they've opposed measures such as "motor voter" for the past few decades?); they figure they can always get more of their base out than we can in low-turnout situations.

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